General

If you happen to be one of those people who burn lot of iso's like we do through our RequestCD program then you would most probably have come across the dreaded checksum errors or md5sum errors. We used to get a lot of these and interestingly we found that we get consistent md5 checksum errors with certain iso images. We were almost sure that this had nothing to do with actual burning errors since they happened only for certain iso images. After hours of scouring the internet we found out the real culprit behind these errors and a way to really work around these phony error messages and actually verify if the iso was written correctly. We burn using either Brasero or K3B but this information can be applied to other cd/dvd burning software as well.

Any software development company which provides software service solutions to customers, has to enter into a contract with the customer, to deliver the agreed upon solution to the customer at an agreed upon price under some terms and conditions, for every project. This contract, called the Software Development Project Contract, binds the company and the customer for the period of the contract by its terms and conditions. As a startup we did not have a full blown software development contract initially and we relied on simple agreements that we conjured up on the fly. However as we grew and as we started dealing with bigger and international clients we had to get a full software development contract. We got this done by a third party and we felt we should share it with everybody and here it is.

We have been running the RequestCD Program for more than a year now. For this program we have been heavily downloading iso's, mostly GNU/Linux distributions. We download either through direct downloads or through bittorrent. Bittorrent downloads are inherently safer because the downloaded iso would be guaranteed error free. However http and ftp downloads results in corrupted downloads once in a while. Traditionally when you end up with a corrupted iso you had to download the iso file again. Not anymore. You can easily repair a corrupted iso using Bittorrent.

One of the most common compression formats used in GNU/Linux and variants is tar.gz. A tar.gz file is nothing but a gzipped tar archive. These days users of GNU/Linux system seldom have to use the command line to create or extract tar.gz archives. But it is a useful command to keep in your arsenal if you are a system administrator.

We recently had to convert quite a lot of Ambili Font based ASCII Encoded pdf documents as part as a project we were working on. With proper guidance from Swathanthra Malayalam Computing, more precisely from Santhosh Thottingal we were able to use the Payyans Unicode Converter for Malayalam for this. As is our practice, we made sure that our efforts would also benefit the community by creating the font map for Ambili font and we are releasing it under GPL v3.

Kerala Taxes recently moved completely to online filing of taxes. To help business owners to efile their taxes, the sales tax department had prepared and released a Microsoft Excel template file(.xls) to be used by the dealers to generate files for filing taxes online. We, at Zyxware, realized that this would effectively force Free Software Users into using Microsoft Office for filing their taxes and took effort into converting this template into OpenOffice.org Spreadsheet Format(.ods)